The City of New Westminster is building a powerful new fibreoptic communications corridor in a bid to attract high-tech businesses to the city and medical technology startups to a new health sciences hub around the expanding Royal Columbian Hospital.

Royal Columbian will double in size over the next decade and during that time much of the surrounding Sapperton neighbourhood will be redeveloped with housing, office space, shops, restaurants and a health sciences cluster known as the IDEA Centre.

The hospital is New Westminster’s biggest employer, providing 3,500 jobs, growing to 6,000 when the expansion is complete. The city hopes to capitalize on the expansion and attract new businesses by building the fibreoptic BridgeNet network and a district energy system to provide renewable heat and hot water.

“We’ve been working toward the IDEA Centre as part of our economic development plan for a long time,” said city spokesman Blair Fryer. “We have relative affordability, an area serviced by two SkyTrain stations, and now this piece of critical infrastructure.”

BridgeNet will help “future-proof” the city against the communications requirements of data-driven businesses, he said. Optical fibre is made up of strands of flexible glass that transmit information with pulses of light at a rate many times that of copper wire.

Mayor Jonathan Cote assembled a committee two years ago with representatives from the hospital, the University of B.C., Life Sciences BC and local businesses and developers to provide input on the development.

“BridgeNet is a key element in our Intelligent City initiative,” said Coun. Bill Harper. “This is part of a strategy to attract knowledge-based startups and high-tech companies into the city. There are a lot of pieces to this plan, but the idea is to come up with a cohesive strategy for building a health-care cluster.”

The one-gigabit-rated network is an extension of the fibreoptic network New West has been building since 2007 to connect the city’s libraries, community centres and city hall, many of which offer free WiFi. The Intelligent City strategy also aims to promote sustainable economic development and leverage broadband Internet to promote health and social inclusion, with free Internet access, public computers and training.

Royal Columbian Hospital, Douglas College and the Justice Institute are already connected to the existing broadband network, and the City has been installing underground conduit — empty pipe that cable can be pulled through — during street work in anticipation of the BridgeNet expansion.

“This is a city-funded and city-owned network, and because the conduit is already there the installation is much less expensive,” said Harper. The city will spend $9 million over five years on the installation.

In phase one, the cable will run from Highway 1 in the east along Columbia Street downtown, then up Sixth Street to Sixth Avenue in the Uptown area. The second phase, to be completed next year, runs along Eighth Avenue and loops through Queensborough. High-speed broadband service is expected to commence in September.

The service will be available first to the business district, office buildings and high-density residential developments.

“BridgeNet will make New West a centre for high-tech activity and hopefully attract people to the city,” said Harper. “We are already seeing an in-migration of young professionals and they are really high on technology.”

Conventional residential Internet speeds range from 10 to 50 megabits per second, while fibreoptic-enabled service providers now offer speeds up to 400 Mbps. In a handful of Canadian communities, download speeds of 940 Mbps are available.

In New Westminster, local Internet Service Providers, including Novus and AEBC, will sell the high-speed service to customers and lease the network from the city. That revenue will pay for the network over the next 20 years.

“That revenue will be re-invested to expand the system to the rest of the city over time,” he said.

Meanwhile, Telus is less than a year into a five-year fibreoptic upgrade that will cover 90 per cent of the City of Vancouver at a cost of $1 billion. Telus will make a similar investment in Edmonton, while BCE last year announced it will invest $1.14 billion to upgrade fibreoptic service in Toronto by the end of next year.

In all, Telus will spend $4.5 billion on new fibreoptic and wireless infrastructure in B.C. by the end of 2019. The company just announced fibreoptic installations in Terrace and the Fraser Valley on top of recent upgrades in Kelowna ($100 million), Kamloops ($50 million), Port Coquitlam ($30 million) and 20 communities from Vancouver Island to the Peace.

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